Day 304

My first verified 5k speed walk since May today. When I say verfied, it’s the only route that I’ve measured using Maps, and know it’s just over 5km long. Done while the sun was shining, too, which made me feel quite upbeat. And now it’s dark, of course, and it’s only six, and quite depressing, really. Cosiness doesn’t come into it when we’re so deprived of daylight. More daylight speed walks beckon.

I had planned to publish a book this year, but what with catching covid, day job being manic in this final quarter, and being very busy on the family front, this is looking less and less likely, which is a shame. But I can’t, in all honesty, launch a book if I can’t dedicate time to publicity, awareness raising, and all those associated things that writers nowadays need to do themselves. And I don’t have the wherewithal to hire a PR company to do these things for me. I think what a lot of people don’t realise or appreciate is that writing books does take time (and therefore money), and that writers deserve to be compensated for the time they spend writing and marketing. That’s another reason Aggie will disappear at the end of November, so that I can focus on the ending, so that the ending will not be in the public domain for free, and so that I can put her together a s a proper book to be released in summer 2023 (possibly). The book I had been hoping to get out this year is the sequel to Dead Men, especially as it’s the 10th anniversary of that being published.

There are reams to be written about what is happening in politics in the UK right now, today, but I think I’ll leave that to those better qualified than me, less visceral than me, and with a greater sinsight into the political scene. Suffice to say that when Braverman claims she is the victim of a “political with hunt,” that’s a phrase straight out of the Trump and Johnson playbooks (well, the same playbook essentially), and it bodes ill. Let’s just also be aware that a refugee centre in England was attacked with petrol bombs yesterday, and that the alleged perpetrator is suspected to have had extreme rightwing leanings. These leanings, these evil and malevolent racist beliefs, have been encourage by people like Braverman and her like, and it’s intolerable. Let me repeat again – at this point, asylum seekers are not illegal immigrants (although the Conservative party is striving to make them so at the same time as it refuses to take up France’s offer of setting up asylum processing centres in France). In my view, no immigrant should be illegal – the current approach if vilifying any foreigner lets the black market in immigration rackets and dangerous Channel crossings thrive. And it’s inhuman. The Braverman debate is still going on as I write this – what’s happening in the House of Commons right now shows how unfit the Conservative Party is to govern.

I miss kindness in public life. Instead, we have lies and deliberate untrue vitriol deliberately spread as a signal to right-wing extremists that they can attack anyone who is different. It’s shameful.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 237